Time and Tide
by RandomOTP
Summary: An OC character that's trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnation is reborn into the Naruto universe. Ensouled into a newborn baby and given the name Shima, what will happen?
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I own nothing of canon Naruto**

**Warning: Eventually it will get rated M for Blood, Violence and maybe a few other things. I mean, the Naruto-verse deals with _war _so be warned that warlike themes will eventually be introduced.**

**Note: This is an AU story inspired by Naruto. I'm a human being and it's been a little bit since I've read the manga, so my personal knowledge of canon is flawed. Furthermore, as it's planned now, this story _will be changing some things_ from the canon lore, the canon storyline, and the canon magic system. Therefore, it won't follow all the beats of canon, and that there will be things that are true in canon that won't necessarily be true in this fic.**

_"I don't ask you to like reality. I only ask you to be strong enough to face it. There is nothing beyond this. There is only the perfection we attain by becoming weapons, as strong and merciless as a sword. There is no essential good in living. Life is nothing in itself. It's a place marker that proves who's winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing." _  
-Durzo Blint,_ The Way of Shadows_

I've long since come to the conclusion that death (or rather, my death) is an inconvenient occurrence. It almost always happens without warning. Imagine my plight: suddenly, you're stolen away from your life, your family, your friends, your culture and country -and above all: those few whom you love and are loved by in turn. Just to face it all over again.

Truly, death is a forced separation, though I've heard some call it a temporary parting of ways.

I know that I shouldn't scoff at the notion... It's a pretty hope, if nothing else. I can see where some might be comforted by it. And who knows? For them, it might even be true. But personally? If that possibility exists, it obviously doesn't apply to me.

I can't help but wonder, here in this grey fog of potentiality and possibility, the murky unlife and notdeath between lifetimes, if there was ever a time when I truly believed that? I think that during my first life, I might have -it's a wonderfully saccharine idea, after all. And I suspect that if there ever was such a time when I was _young _enough to have believed that, then it had to have been then.

The memories of my first lifetime are few and far between, but from what little I cling to, it was a carefree life of indolent luxury. I can't recall all that much of it, but I'm confident that it was my most peaceful life. I doubt that I'll ever have one like it again. War follows me… or maybe I follow war?

I once knew a boy who chastised me for being too reckless with my life. The genuine concern in his azure-sky eyes makes me want to smile, even now. Had I lips to smile, I just might. He didn't know about all the lives I've endured, and the many more I'll come to face. During one lifetime, I was a poet of moderate renown who died in war, and before that I was a child soldier who dodged puberty before it could damn me with acne. What my name was that time escapes me -it was one of my shorter lives, and the minute little details can blur together sometimes.

At one point, though, I distinctly remember being a xenobiologist. That was one particularly interesting life. I died while working with my peers to try and recover after a disastrous First Contact scenario. Humanity had been well on her way to being the only intelligent species in the Milky Way. She ensured it. The interplanetary ban on biological warfare was deemed not to extend to aliens; human rights were _human _rights, they preached in the streets. I don't remember where I stood on that divide, and I try not to linger on that life's memories, clear though they are, on the off-chance that I might remember.

Because I don't think that I've ever really been a kind person. I've been courteous and polite, of course. Even generous wherever I could (this affliction of mine makes martyrdom a bearable option, if no less painful). But kind? I haven't been genuinely kind in a while. This existence of mine simply doesn't allow for it.

The most recent kindness I can recall is the time I was a frontline soldier who fought on the Terra side of the Earth-Mars civil war. It was so many lifetimes ago, but I think that I had volunteered for war, the faint melodies of liberty and songs of freedom urging me and spurring me to action from the hazy recesses of my first life. By then, Earth had changed into something far from the one I had held loyalty to. I wouldn't find out until it was too late.

My participation in that particular military campaign is… not something I'm proud of. I had been doing so _well _before that! However it might have started, I can't find it within myself to regret pushing Victoria -who was little more than a child with a child's zeal and a child's recklessness -out of the way. She had her life to live, and I could always move to the next one.

Because if there's anything that I can count on in this weird life of mine where eras and gender are as fluid as the names I wore, it's the fact that (no matter what) my life will go on. I'll wake up at some point in Earth's history with a new body and a new name… It's almost as nice as it sounds.

Still. Trapped as I am in the wheel of samsara, all things seemed to take on a particularly… skewed look. The longing for knowledge and the desire to _understand_ became my hunger and thirst. I crave intellection like a Haze addict craves their next fix and I want to hoard wisdom like I imagine a dragon would hoard gold.

Slowly, people are becoming less important. A few _**tensofdozensofhundredsofthousandsof**_ lifetimes will do that to you, with faces and names mixing and misting into one another. That's not good, I know. I want to stop this seed of apathy from growing, but it seems like this… _disease _of mine is catered to nourish it to fruition. I fear for the day where I stop caring about it. I've seen too many horrifying things happen when such a mindset is encouraged.

Luckily, I still care about the younger humans, beastly though they may be. Children and babies make my heart smile and I'm almost tempted to have my own. But I can't. I can't allow myself to have children. I just wish I could remember why.

OH! The grey fog's turning black, and I can feel my consciousness merging with crude, infantile flesh. Ensoulment isn't a pleasant process, I assure you. The nerves flare with sensation and the greymatter pulses with pain at the strain of stretching to contain... well, _me_.

All the same, I feel restless. Had I a mouth to smile with, it would be smirking a monstrously toothy smile of eager anticipation. I can't wait to learn everything that this lifetime -this world -will have to offer me.

I felt weak and cold -so very cold. My frail, newborn limbs responded poorly to my demands. That's okay. Aggravating, yes. But okay. Given long enough, this body will mature to meet my mental demands.

Warm, rough hands lift me and I open my eyes to a world of bright, blurry colors. Like a kaleidoscope _just _out of focus, I couldn't begin to hope to make sense of my surroundings. But judging from the lack of white in that kaleidoscope, I… don't think that this is a hospital. Perhaps a homebirth or-

Oh. Oh no. This isn't another pre-medical care era, is it?

A thick, coarse cloth was wrapped around my tiny body -rough on this body's red, sensitive skin -and, involuntarily, I mew in protest. Cool air caresses my face as I was placed in a second person's arms.

This person's arms were _warm _and damp with… sweat, I think. Ah, this body's mother? I relaxed in her embrace as she spoke to the one who held me earlier.

Their chatter was unlike any of the languages that I've encountered before. It didn't seem like one of the variations of English that I'd been raised with during my last few lifetimes. Their words and style seemed _almost_ like twenty-first century Japanese, but the words were too different for that. Maybe it's an offshoot?

"_Shima,_" I heard my mother coo softly as she gently pressed a kiss into my forehead. Lulled into sleep by the metronomic beating of my mother's heart, I drifted to sleep.

**Hey all!**

**This is my first Naruto fanfic and I've decided to do a sorta new take on the Reincarnated Self-Insert idea. My own twist is mostly because I don't think that I could do it anywhere as well as Miss Nanami-chan or Silver Queen. Please leave a review and let me know what you think about this!**

**-R**


	2. 2: A Brand New World

_"..because the only kind of love I have to offer is stupid and blind and so deep and powerful that I feel like I'm cracking just to hold it in." _  
-Kylar Stern,_ The Night Angel Trilogy_

xxx

"Just what're you doing, my beautiful boy?"

I looked up at my mother, my chubby four year old face arranged in a picture of innocence that belied my inkstained fingers that held the scroll's thick paper. "Trying to copy you, kaa-chan?"

Kaa-chan raised a single eyebrow at my answer, not falling at all for my deception. Still, when I discovered chakra –literally fucking _magic _–how could I not want to learn as much as I could? Especially if you can code it through ink and paper! Honestly, the fact that I get to learn something as new as _magic _(or "chakra," as kaa-chan stubbornly corrects) will probably make this my favorite life by far!

Unfazed by my unimpressive pout, the young woman giggled with delight and uncrossed her arms, swooping down to pluck my frustratingly-small body off the ground –she gave us a little twirl that had me (reluctantly, I assure you) laughing aloud at the spin in my stomach. Really, my mother was so kind to try and make my childhood one of love and laughter.

She swirled me in the air for a few more rotations before plopping down at the well-carved table (she's gotten really rather good at that) with me in her lap. The scroll before us held my childish attempts to recreate her alphabet –my own sort of training this body's fine motor control and learning the new language of the land.

Honestly, for how closely the language _sounded _like Japanese, it sure didn't look like it.

"Hmm. Pretty close, Shima-kun. You need to correct a few things, though…" Kaa-chan then proceeded to mercilessly (though not unkindly) point out each and every mistake I had made. I loved every moment of it.

xxx

This mother of mine is certainly in the top 10% of mothers I've had. She's scarily attentive to this body's needs –often knowing when I was hungry only moments before my body deigns to inform me of its demands –and attentive in a way that most of my parents weren't.

Once my muscles developed enough to allow me to walk, kaa-chan allowed me near-free reign of the house and its immediate surroundings under her watchful gaze. A gaze that held a fierce love that I recognize all too well. Woe to the fool who dared to endanger her loved ones.

I knew there was a reason that I like kaa-chan.

Perhaps, in the earliest lifetimes of my existence, there might've been a time where her attentiveness would make me feel trapped or claustrophobic. But I've lived too long for such a minor annoyance to bother me overmuch.

And this is a young, single mother with her first child. I can't exactly blame her for her overzealous care… It'll ease up once I'm not a defenseless four year old. Besides, from the very first week of this body's birth I knew only my mother's love.

Her expressive violet eyes reminds me the post-terraformed martian sunset and her deep auburn hair helps me remember Ireland's expansive hills and dales. Pale, alabaster skin hosts a sea of freckles that've been kissed into existence by the sun.

Kaa-chan's freckles made me a little jealous. At least I had her hair, though.

One day, she mentioned offhand that I look a lot like her, but with my father's tanned coloring. She froze immediately afterwards, a moment of stoic stillness before she immediately immersed herself in her calligraphy. It was the only time that she's mentioned my father and she hasn't mentioned him since. I don't particularly care though, since I'm not really the four year old she believes me to be. Besides, I have _her_ and she's doing a far better job of "raising" me than most people have. To comfort her, I crawled in kaa-chan's lap and pestered her with an unending stream of questions about her calligraphy and fuuinjutsu.

xxx

I stare at the redheaded woman above me, enraptured by the smattering of freckles that decorate her porcelain pale face. With all the overflowing anticipation of a new mother, she's repeating herself slowly, the flowing syllables drawn out in a sing-song rhythm.

It was endearing to see this young woman –who couldn't have been much older than twenty –try to impart her language to me. The word itself she seemed to place so much stress on was easy enough to say, but this body's muscles hadn't developed enough for it.

Still, she was a kind mother with a patience far surpassing many of my mothers before her. So I reached up and placed my pudgy hand on her cheek. Gurgling incoherently, I looked into her wisteria-purple eyes and tried my best to emulate her words.

It would be good practice, right?

Besides, it made her glow with ecstatic joy, judging from the silly little dance she performed in the middle of the cabin's room.

xxx

Kaa-chan didn't mark time very well, but I think that I had lived through at least two winters when I noticed it. There was a pool of warmth behind my stomach that suffused through my body like a warm cup of coffee on a cold icelandic morning or the first gentle caress of the sun after a dark alaskan winter. It felt kind and safe in a way that I couldn't remember feeling ever before.

I… loved it. It was a panacea for my soul. A comfort that bypassed the soul-worn scars that littered my psyche and soothed the aches and pains I carried.

It would only be a few weeks after my initial discovery (tied to this body's development, perhaps?) when I noticed that this feeling wasn't just in _me_, but it was in _everything_. It was in the _safe-sturdy-welcomingembrace_ stone cabin of our home, it was in the _grow-wild-sunlightbright _glade that our humble home resided, it gleamed with a hidden potential from within the ink that my mother fiddled with and glittered dangerously _sheathedclaws-hiddenfangs-unlitfuse _in the tattoos that whirled and swirled in intricate, circular designs –spiraling up kaa-chan's arms from her wrists to underneath the lip of her sleeves.

"Kaa-chan" I fumbled awkwardly. This mouth's shape is more than a little different than my last one, making learning a whole new language from scrap into a harder endeavor than it really should've been. But my mother seemed to think that I was progressing well enough, occasionally calling me her little prodigy –always followed by a flare of deep horror within the depths of her eyes, smothered by a mountain of almost fatalistic determination. "I feel...warm. In me and outside me."

"Well, it is getting warmer," kaa-chan mused thoughtfully. "Should I make another window, little one? It might make for a nice little cross-breeze."

"No, not _heat_," I denied, screwing up my face to try and conjure the right words, sifting through my newly-limited vocabuary. "_Warmth_. In my stomach. In the house. In kaa-chan's ink."

"My ink?" Her eyes lit up like a started deer. "You can feel that already?"

"Yes," I nodded, curiosity burning within me. Kaa-chan seemed surprised, so maybe I wasn't supposed to feel this? But it was something new, something _different_. I had to ask. "What is it?"

"That… my beautiful boy," she hedged carefully, picking me up into her arms. "Is chakra."

Chakra. Like in hinduism? That had never held any weight in reality during my previous lives, but... if reincarnation is possible, then maybe I shouldn't judge too quickly.

She then proceeded to tell me very carefully about this mix of spiritual and physical energies, how it influenced the world and everyone in it. All living things had it and relied on it –and in certain circumstances, it could even be utilized if you were careful enough.

That treasured bit of information led to questions about my mother's fiddling with ink. She always makes her own, picking a carefully measured ratio of strangely specific berries and distilled treesap before gingerly mixing it with a dosage of her own blood ("to combine it with my chakra, and bind it to my will").

Apparently, this was what allowed kaa-chan to do her calligraphy.

Emboldened by this knowledge -that it was possible to learn how to manipulate this… magic, this _chakra –_I began to watch kaa-chan carefully each time she sat down to fiddle with her scrolls, her "fuuinjutsu."

Eventually, she huffed and simply sat me down beside her at the worktable, teaching me the first steps of Sealing. "Better to learn the basics and understand what you're doing than to try to copy an exploding tag and mess up," my mother explained with only slightly deadened eyes.

At the time, I didn't understand what dangers she implied, but I would. And when I learned enough about sealing to understand her concerns, I would once again be reflect of her lovingly watchful gaze and how she indulged any question I had.

I think that I could grow to love this mother of mine.

xxx

Thick stone walls surrounded our little hideaway, lightly blanketed by a camouflage of forest growth kept us safe from the wilderness _–_my mother had inscribed a swirling script that purred and growled at the edges of my consciousness.

Hand in hand with my mother, I waddled out of our stone home and into the meadow. Impossible flowers of every color imaginable gleamed in the morning sunlight like a pastoral painting of rustic paradise. I stumbled through it all with a genuine glee, relishing in the loamy dirt between my toes as I made sure to stop by every flower I saw –loudly demanding "_name_!" from my mother, feeling very much like the child that I should have been.

Somehow, I didn't mind. Because… I didn't recognize the plants at all. There were no wildflowers, no lilies or roses. This meadow held no honeysuckle or heather. I couldn't even point and say "this probably evolved from that." Every plant was so very different than all that I had seen before. I didn't recognize a single flower and I rejoiced in the _newness _of it all.

But what really held a fixture in my heart were the trees that stood guard around our humble abode. Reddish grey, these trees towered even above America's gargantuan sequoia trees from Before. Unlike those familiar trees, these sylvan giants sported thick branches that looked sturdy enough to cradle a tank in its woodland embrace as one might a newborn baby. Idly, I felt a faint urge to carve the wood, to tackle the challenge that it might provide –it'd certainly be harder than carving Venus's soft Dunvin wood.

This was a whole new world, full of things for me to learn.

Please. If there's some distant god or demon out there somewhere (one who would willingly lower themselves to make a pact with me), please don't take me away from this lifetime anytime soon. I like this one.

I… I could get used to this.

xxx

There was a strange man outside. He was garbed in a grey-black sort of armor that's a universal signature of a black ops uniform. The Venetian mask he wore only solidified that idea, regardless that it vaguely resembled a… dog? Or maybe a wolf? I warned kaa-chan about him, and that his chakra felt like cold static that danced with a cautious curiosity.

Her face froze into a cold expression that unveiled just how damaged my wonderful mother really was. But that's okay, she's my mother. I don't mind her scars or her jagged edges. And I have too much of my own to fear my mother's protectiveness –because how could her maternal instincts be spawned from anything _but_ love? She's too good of a person for it to be any different.

My mother's seal-tattoos began to glow an ominous blue in the darkness of our home as she stepped outside, their _curling-cutting-dormant_ edge stirring awake. As kaa-chan's foot crossed the threshold, her household seals activated. Interlocking, overlapping seals unfurled, spiraling outward and blanketed every surface of our small stone cottage –the azure luminescence lighting up the small building like as though it was noon on a clear summer's day.

Worry for my kaa-chan flickered under a wave of admiration for the young woman. Her sealwork was a beautiful tapestry of war-tempered love and maternal devotion that I could only hope to one day replicate… I really lucked out with this mother, didn't I?

An hour of tense silence passed before the seals dimmed to blackness, furling back into themselves. Kaa-chan walked through the front door without an auburn hair out of place. That was the first day that I heard the word "Konoha."

Every full moon after that, the same man would return, trading supplies for some of the spare seals that kaa-chan had deemed lacking.

**xxx**

Just some basic foundational groundwork, but hey: progress, no?  
Shima-kun's name is a combo of the Japanese words for "mountain" and "forest," as translated by Google Translate (so… ya know. Take that info with a barrel of salt).  
Any comments, questions, concerns or ramblings you want to share? Believe me, I (of all people) won't mind  
-R


	3. 3: Wake Up

_"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens" _  
-Gimli

xxx

It started innocently enough. I was murmuring songs from one of my previous lives under my breath as I worked on my calligraphy. My handwriting had vastly improved in this life than in my most recent one, hands steady as they held the brush, flowing from one movement to another with a surprising ease –kaa-chan always managed to find a flaw, nitpicking some minor detail. That made me all the more eager to see the day where she'd deem my calligraphy more than merely "acceptable."

My kaa-chan was a harsh tutor, demanding nothing more than my best and accepting no less. And since she knew Shima-kun well, kaa-chan would see through any attempt to pretend mediocrity. Ever since she seemed to label me a genius, this young mother of mine never seemed very surprised when I accomplished something that no child my age should have done. Or perhaps her unflappability was born more out of being a first time parent with nothing to compare my development to? Either way, it was a relief to not masquerade as just another ignorant child and be my "true" self. Well, I was free to act closer to _myself_ than I had been in a while.

It made me feel a little closer to kaa-chan, actually.

I was working on my calligraphy –through practicing my sealwork with uncharged, unbloodied ink, because anything else would have been stupidly inefficient –when my mother swept into the room, asking what I had been singing under my breath.

I couldn't say that I had been singing along to a musical that didn't exist in a language that hadn't been introduced to this world. Fumbling, I tried to explain that I had made up a story in a fake-language for fun. Children did that sometimes, right? Hadn't that one author spent his childhood doing the very same thing? I couldn't remember.

Any experienced parent would have seen through my lie immediately, but I was also the child that absorbed fuuinjutsu, hunting, history, and every other lesson kaa-chan imparted on me with the thirst of a bored person –_man_, I belated corrected, since this body is distinctly male –stumbling on a lifetime's-worth of interesting things. I was the son that was a ceaseless font of questions (usually some variation of _how_ and _why_) that she was both kind and patient enough to indulge.

So of course, kaa-chan took this knowledge with only a raised eyebrow of mild surprise before demanding that I teach her. "It'll be like our little secret language," she smirked, a secretive mirth alight in her eyes. "We can keep it from Dog-san and he'll never know." A delightful way to ensure op-sec, I suppose. Framed through a child's mischievousness, but that was just kaa-chan's way of trying to preserve my innocence.

I smiled at her thoughtfulness and obliged. Besides, it was nice to share something that actually belonged to _me _with someone else.

xxx

"Again," kaa-chan demanded ruthlessly.

I held my hand aloft, focusing on the leaf (the "hashirama" trees that I so adore have leaves shaped like a maple leaf, but are waxy-thick in a way that intrigued me). I closed my eyes, removing any errant sensory input and focused on the pool of chakra that sat just behind my stomach. A familiar warmth (_steady-sharp-freshforestair-firm_) spread throughout my body like a warm embrace, soothing what aches and pains I've managed to accrue through the day while easing the more mental wounds that my particular… affliction left me with.

I channeled the energy toward the leaf, doing my best to distribute it evenly. If I didn't, then the leaf would either rip at the point of imbalanced pressure or just fall off my hand –depending on the amount of chakra I'd filled it with.

I nodded slightly, confident. Kaa-chan tested it, channeling a light stream of air across my hand. The leaf remained stuck to my hand so she increased the airflow just a little bit. It didn't budge from my hand.

Seventh time the charm, then?

Kaa-chan yelled aloud with pride and I smiled tiredly with her joy. Training chakra was exhausting in a way that I hadn't expected, but after my first encounter with chakra exhaustion, my mother's gentle gaze kept watch over me while I practiced. Like muscles, my chakra reserves would grow with both time and effort but too much too early will damage them irreparably.

"You'll also need control, my little genius. On general, boys have more chakra than girls and our… our clan has a lot more chakra than most anyone else," Kaa-chan once warned me, when a rare thunderstorm boomed over our heads and the symphony of falling rain sounded outside our stonemold cabin. "You'll be able to do a lot more than most people for a lot longer, but Shima… you need to refine that strength with precision or you'll waste chakra needlessly. The ink I make? I shouldn't have to include my own blood, you know.

"I should be able to inject my chakra strait into the mixture without using my blood as a medium. But I can't –my chakra control isn't that fine –and when I try, the ink either becomes too concentrated to use for sealing or it slips away from the ink without leaving enough to matter."

_Refine your strengths and shore up your weaknesses_. A fairly common tactic for anyone in a combat role, but my familiarity with the philosophy doesn't negate its validity. I nod in understanding and I caught glimpse of a long-repressed relief shining through in the too-small smile kaa-chan gave me.

xxx

Once my calligraphy was up to par, my mother started me on barrier seals, rather than anything complex like a sealing array or anything dangerous like explosive tags. "If you make a mistake, the barrier will fizzle out rather than destroy what you've sealed away," kaa-chan explained, leaving unsaid what could happen to a faulty explosive tag –we both knew the obvious dangers in _that_ particular field.

Kaa-chan stressed the importance of a perfect foundation for any seal and taught me how to incorporate support-arrays to lessen the chakra demand. Eventually, I would be able to create my own Master Seals (complex displays of fuuinjutsu, written in scrolls ranging from the size of our chairs to the size of our bookshelf) that I could refer to in later scrolls shorthand-style and do a lot more for a lot less. Eventually. After kaa-chan taught me more about the theory behind crafting my own original seals. And she'd do that only after I master the basics to her satisfaction.

For now, kaa-chan hounded me about the fundamentals and their innumerable practical applications… and I know she'll keep doing it until I can answer _any_ question she has (in detail) at any time, without warning –though thankfully, my mother still answers any sealing question I have. Even if a mere "where does a sealed object go" ended up requiring a two hour-long lecture on what amounted to the interworkings of a hammerspace. Almost half of that was me peppering kaa-chan with variations of "why" until I understood her explanations to _my own_ satisfaction.

It was fascinating, and I committed myself to learning this art (for it was, indeed, as much an _art_ as it was a science) with a zeal that left my kaa-chan smiling with pride.

xxx

I gingerly reached across the stone table (our wooden one had been an unfortunate casualty in the name of fuuinjutsu education) and tapped the corner of my sealing tag with the very edges of my fingertips. This was the fourth different iteration of this particular design for my current project.

The others had more… interesting results. Right now, all of our flammable furniture was either sealed away or stored away in the bedroom, leaving kaa-chan's workroom looking oddly barren. The small room seemed so much larger when all it held was a small stone table –really, my mother was getting rather good at shaping raw earth and stone with her chakra alone… though most of her proficiency came from needing to replace the furniture we sacrificed for the sake of my training.

Carefully, I channeled as little chakra as I could manage into the tag and felt it travel across the chakra-infused ink. A small blue-white hemisphere opened above the tag, shaped a little like a cupped pair of hands. I continued the steady trickle of chakra, and braced myself.

But nothing happened. No wild fire licked at my fingers and no ash met my face. I opened my eyes and saw the most beautiful thing in the whole world. In the center of the blue-white bowl (which was actually an inverted octagon-barrier array, bound by size-density constraints that I had worked for _ages _to get right) was a small flickering red flame, not much bigger than a candlelight.

"Good job, Shima" my mother smirked from the doorway. "I told you that this design would work."

She had. Though, she had also wanted to include limiting annotations to constrict the fire's maximum temperature and size whereas I... didn't. I wanted it to scale with its chakra input, even going so far as to try and have it increase exponentially with a linear input. That hadn't gone very well. The fire went from a nice, controlled stream of fire to a column of runaway destruction that had almost burned down the meadow before kaa-chan could smother the hungry flames in _massive _amounts of dirt. The plants haven't completely regrown, though I'm sure that they will soon enough –forest fires often end up helping the forests that they happen in. So while that iteration of the seal's design hadn't worked, the final version was still able to go from nightlight to flamethrower in a couple of heartbeats.

Eventually, I'll tinker with the design to make it more efficient and make it work immediately. But that was a task for another day. I allowed myself to feel satisfaction in my accomplishment, my lips curling in a small smile at my kaa-chan's praise.

xxx

Emotions are… odd. They're a product of neurochemicals that are produced and released by the brain –an organ, a crude material thing. Being reborn is always different. Being reborn is always the same. Each body that I've had has had different thresholds for each emotion. That vague biological boundary is usually ironed out through societal conditioning and personal endeavors. A human being isn't just biological in nature, but we're also not just a ghost wearing a body like my kaa-chan wears a yukata.

We are our bodies in a very real way… but we're also not just our bodies.

Maybe I'm unique in this regard, an aberration caused by my frequent reincarnations? Or maybe it's my reincarnations that make me particularly sensitive to whatever mind-body divide there might be? Either way, this body _feels_ powerfully. This time, my emotions are unusually potent and, on occasion, I can feel myself drowning in them. Kaa-chan laughs it off as a factor of childhood and I hope that she's right. Otherwise, puberty is going to be a bitch and a half.

xxx

I awoke to my mother shaking me awake. There was a tenseness about her that I immediately disliked, visible in the pinched corners of her eyes and the wild, frayed look she had behind her mask of composure.

"Get up, my heart. We have to go." I immediately leapt out of bed and began to throw my clothes on with an efficiency born from several lifetimes in various militaries. As soon as I tied my boots, kaa-chan swept me up in her arms and held me tightly against her as she ran outside. I could feel hard, metallic inserts inside her kimono –I've never even seen this kimono before, the material felt a little like the spider silk bodysuit I'd been forced to repurpose as underarmor that one time during the Martian Suppression.

Looking over kaa-chan's shoulder, I could see that the house was empty. Like an empty shell of a long-dead turtle, our stone-hollowed home was empty, devoid of every sign of life –save for the seals that sparked and howled dangerously against my senses. As lively as they felt, there was no telltale azure gleam in the dark, no warning that there might be any security seals interwoven in every square inch of the building –_it's a trap, someone's after us_.

The realization crystallized in the back of my mind. My mother was fleeing from someone. She always had been. She fled to protect me. I knew my kaa-chan. She was a proud, clever woman with the ingenuity to supplement her already formidable skills. If she were alone, she probably would have faced this unknown danger head on with her vicious smile that reminded me of a broken bottle of beer –all sharp shards and jagged edges.

But she wasn't alone. She had been pregnant and had to think about her obligation to me first. So she forced herself to allow an enemy unpursued while she did her best to raise me. Well, it certainly explained her reaction to seeing Dog for the first time –the ANBU agent refused to give me his actual name, so I'd taken to calling him by the name of his mask. Not terribly imaginative, but he seemed amused by the moniker rather than annoyed.

My mother dashed through the canopy of trees, darting from branch to branch as though the very hounds of hell were nipping at her heels. For all I knew, they were.

I curled into her body to reduce what drag I could and to keep the cold night air from sapping my warmth. The less that kaa-chan had to worry about me, the more she could focus on her retreat –I'd had a large dinner just a few hours ago, so we should have time enough.

A quarter hour passed –judging by the count of my heartbeats –when a loud explosion sounded through the forest. A swirling mushroom cloud of smoke and ash obscured the stars, the immense thickness of it generating its own lightning. Was this the trap that she set? Even from a distance, it towered into the sky like a metropolitan skyscraper. By gods, it could've covered the meadow at its widest points two or three times over and then some. I felt a nauseating mixture of awe and horror at the destructive power my mother held even as a cold corner of my mind theorized what fuuinjutsu that crafted to get that particular effect –fire combined with wind, compacted with a chakra drain trap set to maximum withdrawal rate with the standard safety annotations replaced with a recursive catalytic acceleration support array.

And that was discounting all that my mother knew that I didn't and the house's own privacy/security seals she might've co-opted for the trap.

As we fled the destruction, Kaa-chan's already tight embrace became even tighter and she picked up yet more speed.

xxx

_Dog looked down at me, suppressed amusement clear in his body posture –there was a minor illusion obscuring the eyeholes of his mask, but his monthly supply trips had allowed for a minor amount of familiarity to grow between us. Kaa-chan never allowed him alone with me but still tacitly allowed our quasi-friendship, so long as we remained under her observant gaze._

_"Are you quite sure that you should be learning this so soon?"_

_I resisted the urge to snort at Dog's concern. "Kaa-chan's taught me how to tree-walk, but she can't water-walk. The clan had different requirements for their ninja, but if I don't learn how to do it now, when my reserves aren't in my way, then I'll never learn it."_

_Kaa-chan's coiled chakra rippled in hidden anguish at my past tense. But it was true enough. Our clan was dead and gone –or at least as good as. I tried to ignore the glow of gentle sympathy in my gut._

"I'll talk to her about Uzu during dinner," _I swore to myself. It hurt kaa-chan to talk about our village, but it was a cathartic hurt –it bypassed her walls and scar tissue, lancing though to the bottled bile she buried inside. Besides, my mother often forced herself to pass on everything about Uzu that she could manage to –from food to techniques to bedtime stories and everything in between._

_Dog glanced across the clearing to kaa-chan, and when he received a jerked nod of approval, he led me over to a shallow pond –the result of experimenting with explosive seals and a few days of idle rain._

_"Now, Konoha's agreement with your mother doesn't cover training, so if you want more later on, it's going to be generalized. The sort of training that anyone could learn on their own, given enough time. If you want something more specialized, then your mother's going to need to acknowledge your_ _heritage _that I definitely don't know about."

_"Why would our… ancestry matter," I hedged carefully, mindful of the mutual doubletalk._

_"Because Konoha had more than just a mere nonaggression pact with a select few countries –like Uzushiogakure, for example. With that_ particular _Village, Konoha had a mutual protection pact in case of war, at least seven separate contingencies for emergency evac –that I know of, meaning there's likely at least three more that I don't –and that's not getting into the immense amount of import/export deals that Konoha had with them."_

_I stare at where Dog's eyes should have been with an unblinking intensity._

_"Point being, I _know_ of two agreements where Konoha offered asylum in the case of a level eight emergency. And at least one in a number nine."_

_Kaa-chan cleared her throat meaningfully, a dangerous look in her eye. Volumes were given in that glare, and Dog hurried to teach me the first steps of water-walking._

xxx

Kaa-chan ran for several days straight, not once stopping to rest. When we got hungry, she would pull a ration bar out of one of her seals, and we would eat while she continued to run –my feet didn't meet the ground once, held as I was in my mother's arms.

Her luxurious, auburn hair had fallen out of its normally utilitarian braid and was now a rat's nest of twigs and stray leaves –after the second night, kaa-chan had decided to forgo our stealthy canopy-run in favor of a mad dash of speed toward Konoha, foliage and underbrush be damned.

I remained silent about my own minor cuts out of fear of attracting trouble and my mother only occasionally gave a whisper of reassurance through her strained breathing. She wouldn't be able to do this for much longer, chakra or no. The human body needs sleep to move, and kaa-chan's been doing a _lot_ of running.

It was sunset on the third day when kaa-chan stumbled to a halt in a nondescript part of the forest. Really, it all looked the same to me, but apparently the undergrowth made a reasonable enough defensive position, because kaa-chan fell to one knee, using sealless, raw elemental manipulation to carve a small alcove in the dirt –it was smaller a jail cell. Still rather impressive for a woman too tired to use a proper jutsu… doubly so since Earth wasn't her primary affinity.

We slept for exactly three hours (just long enough for the full moon to rise) before we departed again. I looked up at the pale goddess in the sky and wondered what Dog would think when he saw the clearing. Sure, we were heading to Konoha (I'd long deduced our destination by the angle of the stars and a mental map of the Elemental Nations, a trick taught to me by kaa-chan through childish games) but that didn't mean we were heading along his path.

In fact, it was probably certain that we wouldn't. As an ANBU, Dog likely went a slightly circuitous route to protect his op-sec whereas kaa-chan was taking a beeline straight to Konoha.

I closed my eyes, trusting my mother to get us to safety.

xxx

My face slammed into the soft forest floor, not the best way to wake up. Adrenalin flooded my body, pushing the last vestiges of sleep away in a wave of alertness. I jumped to my feet, and saw my kaa-chan pulling herself off the ground near me.

Dark bags underscored her eyes with exhaustion, indignant fury and maternal determination openly warred on her face as she plucked a senbon from her calf. Standing up, she waved me over, taking off her pack with a recklessness that worried me –all of our possessions were sealed away, their scrolls held in there for safekeeping. It was an inane thing, to worry about our material possessions when our very lives were at stake.

She pulled out her sealing tools and quickly wrote seals on my skin –a onetime massive storage seal with three foundational arrays and seven support structures to ensure the seal's stability, set to fade when whatever is sealed away is pulled out. I gave kaa-chan a questioning look. Skin made was an adequate enough chakra conductor, but that was stressed whenever fuuinjutsu was involved. Factor in that she was the one making the seal and not me (though, as my mother, her chakra would be similar enough to mitigate the issue… a little bit) and that this was a complex temporary seal? This would demand a lot of chakra from her. A _lot_.

"Look at me, Shima," Kaa-chan commanded, her voice dangerously soft. "I'm going to give you your inheritance early, okay? Inside the pack is a scroll labeled '_Contingent: FUBAR._' It has one scroll for the Hokage and another for you. Read yours before you open anything else."

I didn't smile at my mother's horrible accent with the English language. It wasn't funny this time.

"You're fast, so keep running north by northwest, okay? Don't stop running. Eat a ration bar if you get hungry but don't stop running. I'll meet up with you in Konoha in a few days, I've just got to take care of our tails and I can't do that it I have to watch over you."

I felt a sad smile mar my face. Kaa-chan's left nostril was flaring, just like it always does when she lies. She was even going as far as to try and make me angry, to try and get me to leave her without a fight. My poor mother.

I hugged her, my small fingers holding her just as tightly as she held me. I let go and her grip tightened for a fraction of a heartbeat before letting me go. We both ignored her the clean trails her tears left on her dirty face. I agreed and (after repeating her instructions four times verbatim) she gave me our pack to seal into my forearm before turning around and running the way we came. It was like seeing a Greek throw a discus, or a hunter let loose an arrow.

I rifled through the pack, taking out what I would need before sealing the pack away in my kaa-chan's seal. With a huff, I followed in my mother's steps, using the seal I had slipped on her back as a compass. She would need my help.

**xxx**

Here you go, another chapter of this piece. Whatcha think?

This is my first ever attempt to write anything using first person pov, so I'm not quite sure how I'm doing, but I'll get better –if only so I can look at my work without feeling faintly nauseous!

Have a nice week, my dearest readers!

-R


	4. 4: Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall

_"There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."_  
–Stephen King

xxx

_"Hey, what do you think a sunset on Earth is like," Victoria chirped, nodding her head to some unknown rhythm as she cleaned her gun. "Do you really think it's all orange and red like they show on tv?"_

_"Nah," Puvanro's sneering alto sounded from across the barracks. "Earth has too much pollution for that. Betcha that it's all computerized now. They can make anything look like _anything _on a computer."_

_I glanced up from my bunk to Victoria, her gene-spliced teal eyes cautiously curious behind a childish veneer of indifference. I sighed reluctantly._

_Children._

_"You know… I was on Earth, once upon a time," I began, the soft musical lilt of my voice easily carrying across the now-silent barracks._

xxx

_I remember one time I asked my mother where she got all of these books from –and indeed, intermixed throughout the scrolls were books… apparently, Uzushiogakure hadn't really enforced a standardization about that and had simply left it up to each person's preference._

_Well, it turned out that kaa-chan was the librarian of Uzu and had brought all of them with her when the Village had been attacked. And apparently fuuinjutsu had been very centralized, with Seal Masters and Mistresses depositing their own journals (often written in a tiered-style code to prevent newbies from blowing themselves, or the island, up) and never bothering to write it down again, unless it was to make an updated journal to replace the old one; the Uzumaki memory is a fearsome thing._

_Because Uzu shared her knowledge so openly with her people, the sealing arts was a more communal endeavor than in the other nations; it wouldn't be uncommon for five or more specialists to work together on an array –be it the research for or experimentation thereof. If someone's sealing style was lacking in a certain area, or if they needed a sounding board for ideas, theory and techniques were discussed over tea the way that nosy neighbors would discuss local gossip._

_But the Uzumaki's sealing techniques were jealously guarded against outsiders, and the librarian's role was far more than merely administrative._ So_ naturally, when it became clear that the Village was facing a very real threat of _extermination_, it had been kaa-chan's responsibility to ensure the safety of their collected knowledge._

_Coincidentally, my mother's title of "librarian" was better translated as "Keeper of the Archives" or "Sentinel of the Scrolls."_

xxx

I walked across the forest floor, needing no chakra to silence my footfalls. I darted from shadow to shadow, and from cover to cover as I traced my kaa-chan's tracking seal. South. South. Then south by southeast. It only took a few minutes to find them, but by the end I was able to locate them more accurately by the feel of their chakra (_numb-hollow-mutedresignation_) than by the tag. Kaa-chan (_bitter-primalhurt-determineddeath_) was flipping from tree to tree, flinging tagged kunai at the group of masked shinobi as fast as her stressed body would allow.

As it was, she wasn't enough. I felt immensely glad that I came when I did.

Dead, bleeding bodies were scattered across the ground like pine needles in autumn, but there were four of them still alive, and only one of my mother. Sealing Mistress my kaa-chan might be, but she's utterly exhausted and facing greater numbers.

With one hand, I swiftly pulled a kunai out of the holster at my side, throwing it in a calculated arc towards my mother. With my other hand, I threw a brace of specialized senbon –engraved with a tracking seal on the metal –toward the other enemy ninja, more out of hope for a distraction than anything. Theoretically, the tag, coupled with my chakra-sensing, would let me keep track of all the enemy shinobi at once.

My kunai intercepted the enemy senbon that had been speeding toward her blind spot. No doubt it had been poisoned. The clang of metal on metal was music to my ears. Luckily, I saved kaa-chan and forced the other ninja to dodge out of the way. Unluckily, that meant I now had their attention. I heard my mother swear under her panting breath.

Four on two. Assume the worst. One of the four is probably a poison specialist. Okay, I can do this.

I darted back at a forty-five degree angle, then forward at a larger angle, leaping into the trees to avoid a barrage of… wind jutsu? Huh, that was supposed to be rare around Fire Country, right? I filed that information away for later. Judging by the angle the wind scythe had come from, the poison specialist probably wasn't the wind-natured one. Good.

Flipping from branch to branch, I pulled out one of my more… _experimental _explosive seals from where I was first began learning the art and wrapped it around a kunai. As kaa-chan's ferocity skyrocketed –ouch, unknown shinobi number two probably wasn't going to use that hand anytime soon –I flung my tagged kunai at the wind-user.

"_Four_," I shouted to kaa-chan in English.

She swore once more and immediately disengaged her opponent, getting as much distance between her and my target as possible. Good plan, I should do that too.

The wind-user tried to deflect my kunai (bad move, always dodge when you can) and bright white flames exploded from my seal. It was the result of my trying to make a magnesium torch with fire chakra. Even with the redundancies and the limiters, that seal had _not _one of my safer experiments… or one of my smartest ideas. Why did she approve the test, again?

The wind-user waved his war fan instinctively – tipped with metal _and poison_, I noted –and caused a surge of wind to spread into the blindingly white flames. Likely he thought to push it away, if he even fully registered what it was. Bad move.

Wind chakra and fire chakra are like well-applied makeup and revenge: they go really well together… maybe too well, depending on who you ask. Either way, the instinctive reaction of this ninja was going to have his whole team blinded. I screwed my eyes shut, crouching behind the shadow of a hashirama tree with my eyes buried into my forearms and my forearms digging into my thighs for any extra covering I could get.

The searing white conflagration _exploded _with divine intensity, leaving me half-blind with sunspots, even with my haphazard attempt at protecting my eyesight. I reached out with my chakra-sense and felt five middling lights, wavering in place; the enemy combatants and my kaa-chan were similarly indisposed. Good and bad, that.

Doing my best to blink the sunspots away, I blindly reached for a kunai and aimed using my chakra senses. I let the kunai fly and, suddenly, the enemy numbers were down to three. I think… I think that was the wind-user?

A shockwave of earth bulldozed towards me, kicking up rocks and loose dirt like a stampeding rhino across the African grasslands. Blearily, I leapt into the nearby tree. Blind as I was, I couldn't accurately get my chakra to completely stick to the tree. It was like a cat snagging its claw on a thread, but I managed to use that small amount of leverage to scramble my way up –thankfully, this body was small and thin enough that it was easy for panic-fueled muscles to lift my way onto the thick branch.

Underneath the tree, I felt kaa-chan's chakra spill out of her and deliberately saturate the earth–bad move, bad move, it's a waste of chakra you _can't afford_, kaa-chan –and I knew, with a bitter certainty, that there wouldn't be any more Earth jutsu coming from there. The ground would be safe to fight on without fearing an enemy Earth jutsu… Unless, of course, one of them had a greater control over Earth chakra. Shit. _Plan for Murphy. Always plan for Murphy._

Vision clearing, I saw kaa-chan stagger from the effort and she took a senbon right in the thigh –_very_ not good. She snarled viciously, her face a rictus of rage and anger and the earth bubbled, boiling with her force of her fury.

As the ground itself rebelled against the remaining three shinobi (and swallowing those kaa-chan had eliminated before I got here) I took out my own seal. The candle/flamethrower one I'd worked so hard to create. My first original seal… it was far from one of kaa-chan's masterworks, but it would do.

I wrapped the paper around my left palm so that the input array was at the back of my palm and the output was on it. I shifted my chakra to my right hand and placed it behind my left in a sort of cross-formation and darted behind the poison user.

Channeling chakra, the whirlwind flames swallowed the shinobi –oh, kunoichi, I think, based on her scream. The caustic smell of burning hair and seared flesh clung to the air and I held my breath to stave of the urge to gag. But I didn't let up.

The kunoichi's screams cut short as fire swept down her esophagus and into her lungs, consuming the oxygen there. Sweat dripped down my brow and I began to pant with the effort this took. Distantly, I could sense my mother occupying the remaining shinobi –her (_anxious-__**fury**__-determined-resigned) _chakra darted to and fro, ensuring that she was the one who held their attention and not me.

Meanwhile, I kept funneling my chakra reserves into my seal, not letting up for even a moment. The poison kunoichi desperately hit something between her breasts as she fell to the ground, and a murky green-grey mist tainted my fire, spreading fumes everywhere. Her _tainted-bittersweet-caustic_ chakra stilled, jerking once before finally fading away like a bonfire burning through itself after the last of its fuel has run out.

Toxic, translucent fumes hissed and nipped at the surrounding grass, causing it to wither away into dust. The fumes were spreading quickly, worryingly so. I leapt backwards, backpedaling as quickly as I was able. Shit. She knew she was going to die and did something to take everyone down with her. Some sort of seal? A dead man's switch? _Fuck_!

Suddenly, my kaa-chan was there, flying through handsigns at a speed I couldn't fully process before slamming her hand on my forehead.

A flash of daisy-yellow light consumed me.

And then.

And then I was back in the niche that she had made the other night. How long go was that? One night ago? Two? Or was it only a few hours? This young body of mine had trouble thinking clearly through the fog of exhaustion that clung to me.

I took a wavering step out of the little underground hovel and, as a deafening reverberation swept through the trees and shook the ground, I feel backwards and hit my head on the forest floor. Vision fading to black, my last sight was of a sky blackened by smoke. My last thought was that I had left my mother all alone.

xxx

_"Hey kaa-chan," I asked with an idle curiosity._

_"Yes, my dear," she replied with an amused lilt. My mother could probably hear the burning curiosity underneath my feigned nonchalant attitude. Her smile, as small as it was, made my heart glow with familial devotion._

_I hadn't felt such a strong family bond to someone in… a lot of lifetimes. Was it a consequence of my "truer" self being closer to the surface this time around, or was it a consequence of this body's powerful emotions? In the corners of my mind and the shadows of my heart, I couldn't help but wonder… did it matter?_

_"Is it possible to heal with chakra," I asked straight away, knowing that any pretense at obligatory hemming and hawing would only be met with more amusement from kaa-chan. "We can build with chakra, destroy with chakra, plant flowers with chakra, and grow trees with chakra… Can we heal, too?"_

_My mother_ hmm-_ed for a bit as she pondered my question. I knew then that I had asked a complex question and that she was thinking about where to start to answer my question. Most mothers in a similar situation would have dodged the question, or patted my head with a (completely unintentionally) condescending smile and promise to tell me when I was older._

_But this mother of mine never did that, although sometimes she_ did_ give safety prefaces lasting several hours if something I asked was particularly… hazardous. Then again, with something as risky as chakra, it was well warranted. I may have lived many lives, but I'm not in any rush to leave this one (not with this mother of mine and fucking_ chakra_). So I listened with all the seriousness that the topics deserved and committed her words to memory, preserving each and every syllable for the future._

_"It's possible, little one. But it requires an _extreme _amount of chakra control, from what I understand of it. I think I read in one of our scrolls that it's something akin to stimulating and guiding the body's natural healing mechanisms? But what I do remember,_ quite_ clearly, is that if you don't have the right degree of restraint, then you'll end of causing lesions or cancerous tumors in your patient."_

_Perhaps she'd made her own forays into the study? I glanced to the veritable library of scrolls we had on our bookshelves, fingers twitching with the desire to pour through them for the information. Of course, that every scroll was actually a sealing scroll that had seven more inside (at minimum) only made my inner bibliophile swoon._

_"If chakra control is a problem, would it be possible to make seals that do the healing instead?"_

_"Well, yes. But not in the way you're thinking, my clever boy. Medical chakra is a type of purified,_ refined_ chakra that's not too dissimilar to elemental chakra... in theory. But in practice, it takes a lot of chakra control to sterilize your chakra to such an extent, and even more to keep your medically-shifted chakra from straying away from what you want to target._

_"It's possible to store medical chakra in a specialized chakra storage scroll… again, _theoretically_, at least. I don't know of anyone who's done it –though I suspect the Senju clan might've, if anyone has. But then you'd still be stuck with the issue of chakra control, my heart. Sorry, but there're no simple shortcuts or easy paths to something as complex as medical ninjutsu."_

xxx

_"Hey, Shima-kun," Dog called._

_That wasn't a good sign. Usually Dog just called me some variation of "brat," though never without his an undercurrent of affection in his monotonous voice._

_I walked –well, stumbled, really –over to him from where I had been practicing my chakra control. I was up to six leaves and a rock, though my next test would be to try and roll the rock from the palm of one hand, across my forearms and shoulders, to the other one without losing my metaphorical "grip."_

_"You know where Konoha is, right," Dog stared at me with serious intent from behind that mask of is. "You know how to get there from here, using the stars?"_

_I nodded, and pointed in the vague direction, rattling off distance and a rough estimated time of arrival if I ran at a moderate pace._

_Dog's shoulders sagged in open relief. It was the most overt emotion that I've ever seen him display… it was a little disconcerting, to be honest._

_"Good. Now, if for whatever reason you have to get there –emergency, nonemergency, whatever –here's what you do."_

_Dog then proceeded to flare his chakra in a unique pattern –a little like morse code, but with chakra –and then rattled off a sequence of words that sounded like an incomprehensible gibberish, notable only for its nonsensicalness. In other words, an obvious code that would be obvious to those who heard it._

_Dog made me repeat it four times over before he was satisfied and with every visit, he would question me four more times before he left to ensure I remembered it._

**xxx**

**So tell me how you feel about it, your thoughts and comments are always a welcome delight that never fails to make my heart smile!**

**Also: first time doing a fighting scene. What do you think? Yay, Nay? Maybe with a bit of ****_this_**** or a touch of ****_that_****?**

**I hope you're having a wonderful month thus far,**

**-R**


	5. 5: Aftermath

_"Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness,"_  
–Corvan Danavis,_ The Black Prism_

xxx

When I woke up, my mouth felt dry, bitter with the tang of stale vomit. Groaning, I rolled over and felt my body protest at the movement with a cadaverous cacophony of cracks and pops. Apparently several days without sleep, a poor diet, and then a case of minor chakra depletion wasn't good for a six year old's growing body… who knew?

I stood shakily, my legs trembling at the effort of carrying my own weight, and made my way out of the niche that my mother had teleported me to. How had she done that? Was it a space-time seal? There wasn't a destination-gate marker in the makeshift cave that kaa-chan created, so maybe it was a ninjutsu? I tried not to think about how demanding the chakra requirement for such a feat would be. She had so little left, as it was.

Small step by small step took me outside and under the faint starlight, I could see that the moon was only mostly full. I had been out for at least a day or two. That wasn't good. My mother would need my help.

Marking the position of the stars, I slowly turned in the approximate destination of the battle and began my slow, stumbling trek. One foot in front of another was my mantra, I ignored the burning cold that gnawed at my left hand and the lightheadedness that threatened to drown my consciousness once more. Step by step, one foot in front of the other, I walked through the forest.

I was too tired to keep my head up, let alone make any attempt at stealth. I would have to simply hope that I would go unnoticed by the bestial denizens of the forest and whatever shinobi might be in here with me…

xxx

The first sign that I was near the battlefield was the desolation. Trees with blackened trunks, and grass that crunched underfoot. Leaves still smoldering against off-color ash that _reeked _of immolated flesh and bone. The wind carried with it the noxious caress of singed hair.

The closer my steps led me to the site of the battle, the less dead grass there was for my footsteps to crunch. It was replaced more and more with still-warm ashes that parted beneath my boots with an eerie ease. The malodorous cloying stench of burning bodies grew worse with each weak, wobbling step. I measured my breathing carefully, balancing this young body's desperate need for oxygen with my reluctance to fall prey to dry heaving once again.

There wasn't a clear border that marked the site of the battle, I dimly realized. It was like a gradient of ash and ruination that increased shade by shade until all of a sudden I was in the middle of it. There were poorly-suppressed chakra signatures surrounding me from some distance away, but I couldn't muster the energy to wonder when they had appeared.

This was where my kaa-chan had been. I could tell by the swirls of the ashes and the footprints her distinct sandal-boot hybrid monstrosities (she always claimed they were more comfortable than they looked) that my mother wore religiously. This was where her final act of fuuinjutsu took place.

I couldn't help but wonder if it was it yet another dead man's switch. Or perhaps it was an attempt to burn away the toxic attempt at vengeance from beyond the grave by the poison kunoichi? These thoughts felt faint, as though they journeyed across a great distance to voice themselves within my mind.

I'm familiar with heartbreak. With as many lives as I've lived, I'm well acquainted with tragedy and sorrow is an old friend. But heartbreak such as this? It's a new thing…

There was no great exclamation of rage, no grand wail of grief. My eyes were as dry as a desert's sand dunes. My stomach still gnawed itself in hunger and my shaking body still ached for sleep. The sound of my heart breaking was a small crack –simple and sharp, it would have been easily drowned in the silence that followed. This newest heartache of mine was flat and omnipresent. It was merciless and plain. Pitiless and common. A simple, unadorned fact of life, like the angle of the moon that lit the still-moving world below.

Was this to be my life now?

It felt like I had just begun to love my kaa-chan as a mother deserves. Like I had just begun to open up my old, hurt heart to that young mother of mine. I had had a family in truth for the first time in _ages_.

I might yet live, but what about kaa-chan and her small smiles that were becoming a little less sharp with each passing day? What about her violet eyes that sparkled with pride and radiated mirth? What about her kind attempts to preserve an innocence that hadn't _existed_ for quite some time? What about her dark auburn hair that caught the daylight in a magnificent light? If I dug through the ashen ruins that surrounded me, would I find even a single strand?

An exhaustion of an entirely different sort washed over me, knocking me to my knees. Distantly, I could sense those remote chakra signatures approaching with all the caution of a benevolent soldier finding a war-orphaned child. I stared into the middle distance, numb from the raw emotion that bloomed within my heart.

Let them approach, I don't care. Kaa-chan wasn't around anymore. Maybe she moved on to somewhere better or maybe her existence has simply ceased to be, like the last dying sputtering of a candle's flame after its wick has run out. I don't know, but it doesn't really matter anyway. Whatever the truth of it, I'll still be here, alone. With my long road stretching out before me, no end and no rest in sight.

I sensed the throng of shinobi approach me, and in my peripherals I noted that they were garbed in classic Anbu armor. It looked like Dog's uniform. Maybe I crossed a border at some point. They spoke words as meaningless as the air they wasted. I didn't have it within me to pay attention to the content. It didn't matter.

They continued for a bit before reaching out, brushing a gauntleted hand gently against my neck. There was a tender caress of chakra (_coldlightening-worried-curious-mourning_) and then I fell into the blessed blackness of oblivion.

xxx

I awoke, but couldn't care enough to open my eyes. A soft, plush mattress cradled my bruised body and the sharp smell of antiseptic told me that I was in a hospital. A metronomic beeping kept time with my heartbeat from somewhere off to my right.

There was a single chakra signature with me in my room, but it was suppressed –rather poorly, I sneered internally. To me, it felt like fertile soil and a tumultuous river that bubbled and babbled with the speed of its current. I got the feeling that I wasn't supposed to know that the black ops agent was there. I wonder what the village's Kage would do if he knew my sensory abilities.

A slight stirring of curiosity roused from within the apathetic miasma that encircled me. I extended my focus outward of the room and I was dazzled by the _many hundreds of thousands _of bright lights that blazed, gleamed, and glimmered against my senses. It was like staring at the entirety of the night's sky and studying each and every star at the same time with an unbreakable focus.

It burned my mind, and I could hear the tempo of the heartrate monitor increase with my rising panic. I couldn't look away. Each and every chakra signature cried aloud their details, every single one demanding my undivided attention. It was too much.

A cold hand cupped my cheek with a professional casualness and a vivacious green chakra (_sad-empathetic-concerned-reassuring_) reached out. Before I could fully acknowledge its presence, I was put under once again.

xxx

When I awoke again, there was a stronger chakra presence in my room, leaking chakra like a broken faucet. The chakra (_hearthfirewarmth-familialconcern-hiddenteeth_) blocked out anything that I might have otherwise sensed by the utter brightness of it. It was like holding a spotlight an inch away from your eye, blocking out everything but its own wondrous luminescence. Considering what happened the last time I allowed my focus to drift, I was glad for it.

At least my thoughts were mostly unclouded by medicine this time. Though the soreness of my body warned me against being too grateful for the diminished amount of painkillers.

I slowly opened my tired eyes, and saw a wrinkled old man clad in a formal white robe. Ah, the Hokage, if his ceremonial headgear was anything to go by. I made it to Konoha, then. The Anbu at the battlefield must have been his.

I tried to greet him, but all that came out was a dry, inarticulate croak. Ignoring his amused chuckle, I cleared my throat a few times before trying again. "Hello, Lord Hokage."

He watched me carefully, fiddling on an unlit pipe with a restless thoughtfulness. A moment of silence passed where I lamented my bedridden state.

"Hello, Shima... You're Uriah's boy, right," his rumbling voice inquired courteously. Dog must have included me in his reports. A mixed blessing, I suppose. On one hand, the Hokage knew about me and I didn't know how much about me he knew. On the other, it was easy to verify. I tried to force my sluggish, flagging chakra to flare in the coded pattern that Dog had forced me to memorize.

Instantly, my head spun and I quelled my rioting stomach. Reaching for my chakra felt like drinking in vomit, and burning fire rushed through my veins when I forced chakra through my coils. Head spinning and stomach rioting, I did it anyway.

The Hokage seemed to relax into amusement at the pattern. "I see you remember… _Dog's _code. That's good, but don't do that again. It's a level four emergency-recognition pattern and if you go about flaunting it…"

I nodded with an unspoken understanding. A secret was only kept so by silence, and if Dog had been cleared to pass along a classified passkey, then it would only lose its effectiveness the more people who knew it. Though, I would be surprised if that particular code was ever used again.

"Smart boy," the Hokage preened with grandfatherly approval before falling into a paternal seriousness. "Now, what _happened?_"

I felt a reluctant respect at the Third Hokage's interrogation tactics. He was solicitous enough that any child would be putty in his hands –even before a potentially traumatic event and his grandfatherly demeanor that I _genuinely_ couldn't tell if it was a mask or not. But _Contingency: FUBAR _demanded that I report the events leading up to my entry into Konoha to him with complete honesty.

So I did. I began the night that kaa-chan picked me up and fled, I described the effects of the trap she laid for our pursuers, the multiday marathon she ran and the resultant battle to the best of my memory.

"…and there's a scroll for you she gave me," I finished, glancing at the temporary sealing array that stood stark against the paleness of my normally tanned skin. For his part, the Third Hokage stood as still as a statue with only the quiver of his chakra betraying the rapid churning of his thoughts.

"Your chakra coils are strained from your fight… and you're still suffering from a minor case of chakra exhaustion. Likely from regulating your biology for several days and then fighting immediately after" the Hokage hypothesized after a protracted, weighty silence. "Once you're dismissed, you'll be escorted to my office and we can discuss your options then. For now, just focus on getting better, Shima-kun."

Because a storage seal placed on skin can only be easily opened by the person it's sealed to or by the one doing the sealing. That the Hokage had to wait for me to recover before the seal could be opened spoke volumes of how Konoha's investigation was going. Namely, they hadn't found my mother.

The Third Hokage reached into his inner pockets, placed a fuuinjutsu seal on the wall beside him and activated it. It was a neutral chakra-storage seal with no annotations or supporting arrays. Its only purpose was to store and release neutral chakra –elemental or medically shifted chakra would likely burn it up or merely fill it to capacity _far_ faster than normal, depending on how well it was crafted. It looked functional enough, if... _inelegant_.

The seal lit up with a telltale azure light and began to slowly leak out the Hokage's blindingly bright chakra through the room. Purposeless and undirected, it lingered in the air before fading at a similar rate to the sealing tag's output. It was a makeshift blindfold, crafted with my obvious sensitivity in mind.

Was it a calculated kindness or just a thoughtful gesture? I wasn't sure.

As the Third Hokage left my hospital room, I noticed my left hand for the first time. Wrapped around the palm of my body's hand were burn scars circling, cycling in a perfect impression of my candle/flamethrower seal. It ached with a dull throbbing that was all but buried under the already numerous hurts that my body voiced.

**xxx**

**And Shima's in Konoha for now, but what'll be his fate? Orphanage, Sponsorship, or Exile? Root? Worse?  
I derived Uriah's name from the Latin word for "bear" because as I wrote her character, she evolved into more and more of a mama bear than I had originally planned… so that was an interesting thing to work with xD**

**So what do you think? Questions, comments, concerns, and rants are always welcome!**

**-R**


	6. 6: Family

_"Don't smile. Don't frown. Don't sneer and definitely don't scowl. Your emotions are a valuable vulnerability they'll eagerly exploit. Reveal none of what you feel raging within your breast. Deny them another knife to plunge in your chest." _  
–Jamie, a friend of mine

xxx

The noontime sun beat down upon me from its lofty throne atop a clear blue summer sky. Konoha's humid air simmered with an oppressive heat, strangling the oxygen out of the very air itself. I endured it all, standing in front of a tombstone. Unadorned and lacking any decoration, it simply a grey slab of stone with a name carved into it: "Uriah Uzumaki."

It was the only thing that signified how my kaa-chan once lived beside me. Raised me in this lifetime, teaching me to the best of her ability and loving _me_ (a too-curious child that was too broken to love his mother back until it was too late) as best as she was able.

The name was the only thing that marked the tombstone as my mother's. Two words and no epitaph to encapsulate kaa-chan's memory. Not that anyone in Konoha could have, of course. My mother might have been from a respected, allied Hidden Village, but no one knew her well enough to put anything there. Not even Dog –he and I, friendly strangers that we were, were far closer than he and kaa-chan were. She would always fix him with that gimlet glare, carefully watching the ANBU black ops agent as he taught me what she couldn't. She endured his presence because I would be better off for it. Kaa-chan loved deeply like that. She _had loved_ deeply like that.

The Third had offered to carve an epitaph in my place, or to have someone else carve my words for me. I laughed at his face. It was a familiar laugh –broken, harsh laughter that sounded a little like shards of glass to my ear. The Hokage had winced at the sound, as though cut by its edge. I knew, in an vague, idle sense, that I would regret doing that one day. Any break is a glimpse into vulnerabilities.

But how could I help it? The old man had never met my mother. He would never know how her gaze would drift toward the treeline when she thought of home. Or how, when startled, her hands would twitch toward her kunai holster –this world's equivalent of a gun holster, though kaa-chan twisted them into all-purpose chakra grenades. How could he, a man who had never witnessed the warm light that fuuinjutsu brought to her face, say _anything _true about my mother's self? At best, it would be the usual pithy comment about service and sacrifice. Those are rarely as true as we might hope.

I tried not to think about how Konoha would never get to know my fiery mother, whose emotions burned with the passion of a dying star –lighting up the void of life with brilliantly effervescent displays of emotion, somehow irrepressible despite all of her scars and trauma.

Uzu's memory might have been honored and treasured by Konoha, but I knew that at the end of the day, the Uzumaki were an all-but extinct clan. Our Village was already fading into history, soon to be consumed by the entropic sands of time. Whatever remnants of my clan that might live are now likely mere relics of a clan that most only know through word of mouth, through dusty old tomes and moth-eaten scrolls –as though our people could ever be summed up in a few lines of ink in a text. Even the Third Hokage himself confessed to not being very familiar with my clan, in spite of the fact that Harishama (the First Hokage, the Founder of the Hidden Village System, _and_ _his mentor_) had been married to the Spare Heiress of the Uzumaki's main branch.

Perhaps that was, in part, our own fault. The Uzumaki, vivacious and loud and _bright_ though we might have been, are –in the end –a private people.

As Hiruzen had left, I was struck by the realization that I –of anyone living –was the one few who knew the _real_ Uzu. Our food recipes, our traditions, our structure, our sealing arts, our marriage ceremonies, and more. I was likely the last living person to know about what made Uzushiogakure more than an island. I was the last person to know what that place a _home_. And I had never stepped foot on the place; all I had were the second-hand accounts from my mother and an archive of our literature. I'm sure there's a lot that I don't know. Things kaa-chan, herself, didn't know and things that she didn't have the… things that she didn't have the time to pass along.

All of that would now fade into oblivion. Uzushiogakure, now, was certainly dead and gone, in body and spirit. The genocide of the Uzumaki clan –once the largest clan in the world, populating an entire Hidden Village on our own –was finally complete. If, by some miracle, we _were_ able to build up our numbers once again, we would be a completely different clan. We wouldn't be a phoenix that rose from our ashes, we would be a spirit possessing the corpse of a dead people.

I bit my cheek, willing myself not to cry tears of frustration and lost. The familiar metallic taste of blood helped me focus. These days, my emotions bubbled and boiled a little too closely to the surface for my liking.

At least Kaa-chan's (_vacant_) grave wouldn't be alone. It was in a large, spacious cemetery that had been set aside for the graves of whatever few Uzumaki that might Konoha stumble across. My mother was only the fourth addition to this otherwise empty graveyard. The tombstone of Mito Uzumaki kept my mother from being alone on this hill. Gratitude sloshes in my stomach like a burning poison. She's been alone and without her kinsmen for far too long.

I forced my trembling hands steady and picked up the tools beside me –a hammer and chisel, provided by the Hokage. Under the gaze of my protective detail and the harsh glare of Konoha's unforgiving sun, and, pressing the metal edge to kaa-chan's sturdy stone, I began to inscribe her epitaph.

xxx

After that initial visit, Hiruzen Sarutobi made daily visits to replace the leaking sealing tag. Invariably, he would bring a too-large lunch that he would insist on sharing with me "to save his stomach." It was hospital-appropriate food, designed with nourishment and a healing body in mind.

I didn't know how much of his behavior was an act and how much of it was a genuine desire to comfort a newly-orphaned child. For the first few visits, my answers were monosyllabic and concise to the point of misinformation. I didn't care enough to speak.

After a few days of one-sided conversations, the Hokage soon stumbled upon my love of knowledge and our lunches quickly became a sort of trade. He would offer rambling lectures about anything and everything. Normally, I would suspect some amount of subterfuge, but the old man had resorted to cycling through random topics haphazardly, hoping one would spark my interest, hoping one would spark some life within me. It had eventually been a story about Tsunade, one of his own apprentices and a member of "the Sannin." A title granted to the trio for their acts in the Second War.

_"Titles,"_ I thought contemptuously.

At the end of the Third's lectures, he would answer my questions and then I would answer his. I probably revealed too much about the true depths of my knowledge, but I was far too tired (far too _raw_) for any great amount of deceit. Considering I wasn't dragged off to be interrogated or dissected, I guess that he chalked up my intelligence to kaa-chan's influence. Or maybe they, like her, labeled me a prodigy and simply left it at that.

Still, when the Hokage asked about my sensory sensitivity, I don't think that he was expecting me to admit ignorance of its origins. In all honesty, I don't know if my chakra-sensory abilities are rooted in my particular affliction (after all, chakra is a fundamentally foreign thing for me, and that in itself was _interesting_) or if it was because, for the first six years of this life, I was isolated from other people. Either one could easily render me unusually sensitive to the presence of others.

However the causation flows, it took almost two weeks before feeling the feeling of over half a million chakra signatures ceased to become overwhelming and was rendered more like the background noise of a particularly busy highway.

It was around then that I met Kushina.

**xxx**

**Reworked the outline. Shima was born in 37ME and it's currently ****_about _****43ME. Uzu fell sometime around the start of the 2nd war and since I can't find the date of Mito's death, I'm just gonna say that she's dead by the time Shima enters Konoha. Whatcha think? Reviews are always welcome and always treasured!**

**-R**


	7. Kushina Interlude 1

_"To say goodbye is to die a little." _  
― Raymond Chandler

xxx

**Years prior...**

Kushina leaned back, savoring the warmth of the morning sun on her skin. Gently, she gripped the edges of the small wooden boat between her small hands as it rocked to and fro, keeping time with the waves of the ocean. She trusted the Qwari's sailing skills, _really, _she did, but the dark and bottomless sea underneath the boat always stirred a feeling of apprehension in her stomach. It set her fingertips on edge, ready to fly through handseals that Kushina hadn't yet been allowed to learn.

"Are you okay over there, little Rose," Qwari queried from the stern of her wooden craft, amusement draped over the would-be shipmistress like a well-loved cloak. Kushina scowled at the Qwari's abbreviation of her nickname. Rosefish. Because even by Uzumaki standards, Kushina's red strands were _vibrant_. "Don't you trust my handiwork?"

Qwari had been a good friend to Kushina. Through the death of her parents, Qwari had helped her to navigate the troubled waters of Uzushio's politics with all the ease that the chunnin had out at sea. When the would-be shipmistress first learned of Kushina's fear of the ocean, Qwari made it a point to drag her out on the water at least once a day. Though Qwari's methods had been aggressive, annoying, and _insistent_, Kushina couldn't deny the results. Six months ago, Kushina would never have dreamt of being this far from shore, Qwari's craftsmanship or not.

And Kushina trusted Qwari's craftsmanship. Really, she did. Qwari had wanted to be a shipmistress in full since Kushina had first met the much-older girl. Given any opportunity, the chunnin would ramble and rant about the merits of _this _type of wood over _that_, or why it was that _Varo's_ iteration of the standard Ship Stability Seal was more compatible with Cerne's waterproof matrix, and_ definitely not _Kei's. Really, most of Qwari's babbling was incomprehensible to Kushina, but she liked to think that she learned _something_ from them.

Besides being suitably impressive, it also showed that Qwari, for all her relaxed demeanor, knew what she was doing.

Kushina glanced back at Qwari –one hand on the rim, the boat's stability an ever-present worry in the back of her mind. Qwari lounged at the stern like a cat in the summer sun, legs kicked up and one hand lightly dipped in the water, using the most basic of water techniques to move the boat in accordance with her will –the very first technique taught to children before all else, even the water purifying ones.

Irritation and jealousy alike surged in Kushina's heart. Qwari, carefree and as careless as ever, reclined on the boat as though it were a throne. As though the depths of the sea weren't_ just underneath them_, waiting to swallow them whole. As though Qwari wasn't doing the most difficult thing in the world.

"You wouldn't let me drown," Kushina mocked Qwari with more spine than she felt, doing her best to ignore the sway of the boat. "Who'd bother with you then? Uta? We _both_ know what he's after."

Qwari smirked, seeing through Kushina with an ease born of long experience. "Really, Rose? Is that how you _really_ feel about our esteemed dockhand?"

Kushina blushed, suddenly reminded that Qwari was a prominent chunnin and a budding shipmistress. That Uta was a dockhand slated to rise through the ranks, if only because of his… personality, rather than any inherent skill at the job. Kushina was suddenly aware that this conversation could put Qwari in trouble, let alone whatever ramifications it might have on _her_.

"I. Um. I have the upmost faith that he'd be professional enough to maintain contact with you in the event of my death," Kushina hedged, trying not to wince at her own words.

Qwari's smirk became a full smile, and the sound of her harsh laughter filled the air. Rough and loud, Qwari's laughter reminded Kushina of the rapids where her parents would take her in the summer. Kushina's expression became a mask, frozen at her earlier embarrassment. Not for Qwari's sake, but for her own. If Kushina broke down into tears now, she might never stop. She'd crumble into despair the way Old Varo did when his son was lost to the sea. Only unlike Varo, Kushina didn't have her career to drown herself in.

Qwari's laughter trailed off and heartbeats of silence passed before it was interrupted, once again, by Qwari. "So tell me, what _do _you think of Uta? Be honest, we're out far enough that no one'll hear." The searching look that followed ensured that it wasn't a tetherless tease from one friend to another. It was an inquiry from an Uzumaki chunnin to an Uzushio civilian. Uzu is One, in theory. In practice?

Kushina latched on to the command as an opportunity to distract herself. Anger and irritation were far preferable to cold apathy and cloying sorrow. "He's an _eel_," Kushina ground out, fingernails digging into the boat's wood. "He's a slippery sea beast with more faces than Lo herself!"

Qwari chuckled briefly at the comparison of Uta to the moon spirit before her face suddenly fell into a rictus of solemnity. "Remember little Rosefish, that not all sea beasts slither in the sea. You'll need to remember that, now more than ever. Repeat it to me, Kushina."

Bewildered, Kushina repeated it back to her friend. Later, Kushina would wish that she had taken Qwari's advice to heart. But by then, it'd been far too late.

**xxx**

**Let me know what you think, yeah?**

**-R**


	8. Forgotten Memories: Interlude 1

**TW: Mentions of death and mortality**

_"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."  
― John Steinbeck, the Winter of Our Discontent_

xxx

"_You don't deserve that!_" Strawberry blonde hair framed Anna's freckled face, softly scornful eyes glared at me. We've had this conversation a thousand times before, but she doesn't have long enough for the two of us to have it for a thousand more. I'll miss her when she's gone. I hold her frail hand in mine, cancer taking the firm strength she once commanded. That strength, that passion, has reluctantly retreated to Anna's eyes. Fire and fury and love alike reside there –a last refuge in a body at war with itself.

I remain silent. What's left to say? We know each other's verses too well for this play to bring anything about. Besides, I don't want to argue with Anna, my love, we have too few days left together to spend them in argument. It breaks my heart.

"_Look at me_," Anna's coarse voice whispered her love-laden fury. Her hand claws into my own, her gaze seizing mine. "You're going to move on, do you hear me? You noble bastard, you _will_ move on!" I don't want to move on. "You have years ahead of you and I re-_fucking_-fuse to let you live them alone!"

I pretend not to notice how her voice breaks with anger. At my stupidity. At my "unwanted, misguided loyalty." We've talked about this before, about my… condition. Anna's the only one I've ever told about it. And she's proven my trust repeatedly. She's… Anna's my love. My dearest dear. If soulmates exist, then she's mine. But I'm not hers. I _can't_ be, not really. Where she goes, I cannot tread.

Anna flops back on her bed, struggling not to breathe too heavily -she thinks it'd make her look like a fragile little flower. Her eyes are a little unfocused, but their intensity still captivates me. "I will be waiting for you at the end, but you have to keep walking!" Because if I don't, then I'll be _dragged _along the path I'm made to walk. I know these words and arguments like the back of my hand. But I don't want to move on. I don't want to forget about Anna. My grip on her hand tightens. I don't want to find another. I want to remember Anna through to the end, if it may ever come. I want to remember her scowling face and her fiery love. I don't want this life to be buried under the deluge of lifetimes that I have coming this way. But I've lived through ten and I don't see an end in sight. The details of my first few are already fading and –

"Hey," Anna's hand cups my cheek in a rare moment of tenderness. Lately, those have been becoming increasingly frequent. Her eyes are full of her love for me, deep waters of solace and strength that I should be providing for her. "I know you. You don't want to. But one day, you will. And you'll feel like shit for it. But I want you to remember this, _above and beyond all else_. I won't resent you for it. I won't hate you when it happens. No one's an island, my love. Don't force yourself to be, especially for my sake."

Her watery smile gently evokes one of my own. "Because you bastard, if you do, I'll have to _conquer hell_ and crawl out, just to beat some sense into you!"

A wet chuckle bubbles up and escapes me, then. Anna's irreverent humor provoking a noise that's not quite a sob, but not quite a laugh. Anna's laughter joins mine and it's pure. Weak from her illness, perhaps, but pure and warm and light. It joins mine beautifully, changing my sorrow into something... a little less heavy.

**xxx**

**Not really relevant to the main plot, just sorta background info that's stuck in my head. I'll probably write more little snippets like that, for my own benefit. If you'd like, I can post them here, too? It's just a little exercise for me to think about what kind of things that Shima's gone through in his long, long life (some of which he even remembers!).**


	9. Minato: Interlude 1

_"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry"  
-Proverb_

xxx

Minato fiddled with the thin wooden band that encircled his finger, unused to its weight. He was tempted to do the same to his newly-pierced ear, but the lingering pain warned him of the potential consequences. Sighing, the blond jonin picked up the file, flipping through its pages again.

Shima Uzumaki. The file had been lying on his table when Minato woke up this morning, its innocent appearance belying the fact that it hadn't been there when he'd stumbled to bed the night prior. Ordinarily, he'd suspect Kushina. She was normally more direct, but being surprised by a cousin's existence –however distant –could've easily been enough to make her resort to more circumspect methods. Especially if the Hokage had declared the boy's existence a secret.

Of course, the pristine and untouched state of Minato's perimeter seals and alert matrices suggested that one of the Anbu agents –Wolf, more than likely –had been the one to deliver the file. Black ops agents, by necessity, always have a... _fluid _definition of privacy. The bastards. Minato glared at the script that lined his walls. He'd have to go over them with Kushina again.

Minato skimmed through the file for the third time that day, and was disheartened to see that he hadn't misremembered any of the facts held within; the Academy's memorization techniques having preserved the information well. The hospital report detailed a highly developed chakra system that, coupled with the standard Uzumaki markers, meant that Shima currently had more accessible chakra than most _genin _–despite his age. Of course, the fact that a six year old had active chakra coils at all meant that someone had ignored the risks inherent in manipulating chakra at a young age.

Minato's lips pressed firmly into a line. Training chakra was always dangerous, especially when just starting out. And the younger a ninja was when he began, the greater the risk that the child would, at _best_, cripple himself for life. Minato would never openly question the Third Hokage, at least –not when he wasn't hidden behind three layers of apparently useless fuuinjutsu –but training children as young as they had been? Minato couldn't think of _anyone _who agreed with the wartime policies.

Well. Save for Orochimaru, but even _he _had initially objected to it –in his own way.

Minato flipped to the next page, staring blankly at the words as he contemplated the file before him. Shima Uzumaki. Class B refugee, classified parentage, marked intelligence, notable maturity, currently in an emotionally vulnerable state with no outward signs of mental instability. Highly skilled for his age group, and projected not to blend well with children.

Minato stared blankly at the boy's picture. Even sketched in black and white, the dark bags under Shima's vacant eyes were prominent, detailing reams and volumes of the boy's emotional state. His expression was an unsteady sort of blankness, one that warned of strong, raging emotions that were kept in tight grip, rather than Kakashi's natural rationality.

Merging the two would be difficult –the two had too strong of personalities for that _not _to happen. Doable, maybe, but not easily. Shima was currently emotionally fragile in a way that Kakashi had never been before, and his apprentice was too young to know that such a vulnerability wasn't a weakness to be ashamed of. No, definitely not easily. And there would be repercussions for both children. Heavy ones.

Not for the first time, Minato quietly lamented Kakashi's age. Too young in years to understand, too old in mind to be swayed. Minato closed the file with a frustrated clap of his hands and tossed it back on the table. In time, Kakashi could learn that Shima's vulnerability wasn't a _weakness_, but was, instead, a _wound_. In time. Time that Shima might not have.

Minato leaned back on his couch, letting his mind turn over the headache that was Shima Uzumaki. Too young for jonin to give a second glance at, too politically interesting to seamlessly fit into a new family, and too smart to connect with most children his age. The boy's skill in fuuinjutsu meant that he'd likely end up in the Scribe Corps. And if Shima was given the choice between that or the Academy, then the boy would probably chain _himself_ to the desk and thank the Hokage for the opportunity.

After all, boy's origins might be blacked out, but it was clear from his "refugee" status that Shima hadn't been raised in Leaf and, therefore, wouldn't know how the Academy's workarounds functioned. And the prodigies who didn't know the workarounds usually ended up…

Minato vigorously ran his hands across his face, wincing as he brushed his new earring, then smiling at the reason behind it. Kushina. Wait. Kushina knew about her cousin, right? Minato snapped back up and, with renewed purpose, flipped open the file before confirming what he already knew. They'd met and, apparently, had gotten along well enough that the report mentioned it.

Minato felt a genuine smile grace his face, a rare occurrence these days. Kushina, new as she was to the jonin ranks, hadn't been made to take on a genin team or an apprentice –the current disquiet between Leaf and Grass meant that most "unchained" jonin were likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. But Shima was an _Uzumaki_, and Kushina wasn't likely to be fielded unless it was as a last resort. It'd be possible.

An idle handsign and the file became scattered ash. Minato left his small cottage and began walking towards the Hatake home, his mind racing with plans and plots, examining them from every possible angle, predicting problems and –if they were minor –working around them, or discarding entire plans in favor of other ones –if they were not.

Yes. Yes, Minato could make this work. It'd take up three of his stored favors, two of his personal seals, and an apple, but he could do it. Besides, what better wedding gift than to help his wife get closer to what little family she had left?

**xxx**

****I have a migraine and the caffeine from my pain medicine is keeping me awake. So, naturally, instead of doing coursework that's suddenly been thrust online, or doing something that's _actually _productive, I had a plotbunny that just _had _to be fleshed out.****

****Oh, I'll also probably be phasing out the Japanese in the story, going forward. The "Kaa-san"s will be shifted to"mom/mother," for example, partly because Shima's acclimated to the language of the Elemental Nations, and partly also because adding words from a language I'm not fluent in creates a "speedbump" in the narrative flow when I write, making what I write to be, somehow, of even _lower _quality.****

****And this is the last of the "updated" chapters. Updates will continue to be sporadic due to the pandemic. Have fun, be safe, wash your hands.****


End file.
